Creative personal development coaching, clearing and planning to help you set goals and live a happy and positive life!

Hello

Hello and thank you for visiting my blog.

If you are feeling stuck, lack direction and need to find a way to move forward with your life then you have come to right place!
However…I have to warn you that I may NOT be the right coach for you so read on and find out if we will be able to work together…

My background and 30 year career in the media has meant that I have met, spoken to and interviewed MANY MANY people from all walks of life and in all imaginable situations.

The major events that have happened in my life have also shaped who I am today and why I decided to train as a life coach.

AS a young journalist on local papers I encountered people at their most vulnerable. Yes, I wanted to interview them and write about them but on some other level I wanted to help them change their lives-I have always been able to see the potential in everyone.

When my own marriage collapsed in 2000 I was left with two very young children and I was devastated. The whole experience left a lot of damage that lasted for a long time including ill health, near financial ruin and lack of confidence and self esteem. I had no choice but to get on with it-I read my first self help book about ten years ago and have never looked back.

As a journalist on local, regional and national newspapers, magazines and in television I have interviewed thousands of people-many of them as they celebrate amazing things in their lives, many at their most vulnerable and many who didn’t want to be interviewed at all!
Journalism gave me an incredible insight into people, the human condition, and how people cope with different situations and stages of their lives. I have been extremely fortunate to have built a successful freelance career as a journalist and a writer and a few years ago this led to me working for a very different kind of news organisation.
For the last nine years I have helped to run a social enterprise. This has involved working with groups of volunteers from challenging and deprived communities and training them to be community journalists. They then work on their own community newspapers.
Our organisation was awarded national training accreditation a couple of years ago from the National Council for the Training of Journalists.
As I started to work with more and more people from different walks of life and facing different challenges it became clear that by learning to write and being able to express themselves through words, their lives were changing. Sometimes the changes were quite small, at other times the changes were more like transformations.
I saw people who were homeless, coping with challenging mental and physical health conditions, recovering from addictions and with no self-confidence and couldn’t even look me in the eye, become confident and accomplished at writing and at life in just a few weeks.
The results were astounding, volunteers became confident, able and in charge of their own lives. They got jobs, went to college and university and worked as volunteers for us and other organisations. Learning to write was the key to starting that change.
The media is a strange industry and as well as working as a journalist I found myself as a manager in a big corporate communications department at one point too. Management experience there and training experience at the social enterprise all combined to fascinate me with personal development and really helping people to reach their full potential. Our social enterprise was lucky to have a training partner that was a university and my contact there asked me if I would be interested in running some personal development planning courses for them.
The rest is history! I started to introduce personal development coaching into the journalism training courses and the results were even more incredible. I was then asked to work with different groups of people-groups of women who needed and wanted to make changes but didn’t know where to start, recovering addicts who needed a positive life path to keep them focussed and ex-offenders who had to take part in rehabilitation work to re-start their lives.
Personal Development Coaching can help everyone. Combined with our Write your Life system the results can be astonishing. I am an accredited Life Coach and have completed a Post Graduate Professional Diploma to make sure that I can offer all of my clients the best service I possibly can.
So whether you want to change careers, start working for yourself, gain confidence, improve your self-esteem, go back to education or simply have some time to make space in your life for YOU-I can help you get there.
By using journaling and writing you CAN re write your life. So…that’s my story so far, I am looking forward to hearing yours and helping you to write the next few chapters of your life.